Productivity.

The last few days, Maria's friend Patricia has been visiting from Austria. They met when they both lived in Ecuador, and it was convenient to visit now that everyone's in Europe. I had a good time getting to know her, and this morning they left for Spain together.

I woke up this morning -- er, afternoon -- feeling strangely productive. I went straight to the mass transit office and bought a tram pass for the year. The "student" pass turned out to be more like the "young people pass" with an upper age limit of 28. If you pay all in advance and sign up for 12 months, you end up saving about 90 euros off of a monthly rate. Which ends up more thancovering those extra two months I won't be using when I return back to the states.

One of the weird things about France is that, for everything you need a photo ID for, you have to bring your own. This is things like passports, student IDs, tram passes. But it's not as much of a hassle as I'd think in the US, where only pharmacies and some copy shops do passport photos. There are actually photo booths for this kind of thing in grocery stores and malls all over the place. I wish I would have known that the first time I watched Amelie, because I think the whole photo booth theme would have made a lot more sense.

Anyway, after that I grabbed a sandwich and a can of orangina, both of which have quickly become dietary staples, and went in search of the bank. I found it more quickly than I expected, which caused me to have to finish lunch on the sidewalk in kind of a hurry. It was already 4:30 when I was at the sandwich place, and banks tend to close earlier than everything else. A woman at the desk walked back to get a colleague, who helped me with the account. In the middle of explaining the benefits and obligations he stopped and said "You know, I was told you didn't speak French very well, but I'm not sure why. You speak just fine," -- or, you know, something on the order of that but in French. I'm not really sure what's going on, but I haven't had good luck communicating with women in France at all. Who knows. What I do know is that I finally opened my bank account, and got the insurance for the apartment that I'm required by law to have, and next week will be able to pick up my checkbook and Carte Bleue. The CB is, as far as I can tell, just a debit card -- but it's the technology that everyone here uses. The one time I tried to use my American debit card at other than an ATM, it caused so much hassle that I decided not to do it again. Plus, there are fees involved.

Anyway, after that I was encouraged by my sudden productivity and ability to ride the tram without paying 3 dollars per ride, and I started walking.

I left the bank and headed toward the Garonne, which is the river on the sort of east side of town. Until this afternoon I'd really only gone at night, and it looks rather different during the day. I started basically at Place de la Quinconces (that top photo is a pretty wide view), which has the center of tourism and a huge war monument, plus a (semi-)permanent carnival, a carousel, and a stand of really awesome trees that I'm not sure I conveyed well.

I just sort of followed the river ever northward, to the end of the B tram line, which is the one my apartment and the university are both on (although the university is close to the other end). I ran into a rather large boat with a whole bunch of people in the process of embarking. Or re-embarking, probably. There were a lot of families in that area just walking or kicking soccer balls around or whatever. It seemed like a nice place to just hang out.

A while after the giant boat I could see some sort of gothic something-or-other over the tops of the buildings, so I wandered away from the river to investigate it. It wasn't quite a cathedral, but definitely a gothic church. And half-renovated, like all of the other famous buildings in town. I love being able to see that process in action, because all of the buildings can be seen sort of how they looked when they were new, but if you look at the parts that have yet to be refurbished, you get a much better idea of how old the buildings are.

A little further beyond the church I ran into a skate park, which made me particularly happy. I still sometimes wish I could skate. I also mourn for my lost sense of invulnerability. I was so much more willing to risk being injured when I was younger. I'm not sure if I grew out of it, or I got hurt one too many times. Probably a combination of both. For some reason, girls are always way underrepresented at skate parks -- yet another reason to learn. It was a pretty cool set-up, with difficulty ranges going all the way to a "debutant" course for 3-8 year olds.

The skate park was an example of one of the many things that is cool about Bordeaux as a city. In Tulsa, the skate park is on the west side of the 21st street bridge, down at the bottom of a hill and obscured from sight from the road. It's not well-maintained and it's not well-publicized. In Bordeaux, not only is the skate park at a central location with lots of foot traffic, it's also right on a major road and the tram line -- next to a police station and a bunch of businesses. Also, it has a rather large City of Bordeaux - "ma Ville" logo. It's definitely an attitude inclusive of young people that I appreciate. Maybe young people would stop leaving Oklahoma if the things they liked to do were treated this way.

Anyway, the trip continued until I found a pretty awesome guitar store at the terminus of the tram. By this time I was pretty tired of walking, so I caught the tram back home. I had all the best intentions of making some stir fry for dinner, even as far as going to the grocery store for appropriate vegetbles, when I realized that the brick of chicken I took out of the freezer would probably take two days to thaw. Alex and I got some pizza at the place near our house, where the two employees like to chat (and who we ran into at the Latin club last weekend!) and took it to the river to sit and eat.

Also, all of this picture formatting is kind of wearing on me. In the future, I don't know that I'll be posting this many pictures.